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My wife and I have never received a water bill for our home. We do receive a cut off notice every few months, which results in a minor panic where I quickly login to the Water Authority's website and make a payment.

On Friday, for the first time, I examined the mail side by side with the cut off notice. The cut off notice has my wife's name on it and is from "Erie County Water Authority". In the mail is an item addressed to my wife's parents from a company called "The ECWA ORG". My wife dutifully takes this to her parents house every month. Hmm. It's the missing water bill.

It gets stranger when I log into my account online. All of the information is mine, not my wife's so I don't know how her name is on the cut off notice. Back when we were first married, we had all kinds of problems as my wife declared bankruptcy just before we were married and her name does not appear on anything because of this. It is pretty unlikely that they would have connected the service in her name, because we heard "No!" so many times, we stopped trying to put her name on stuff. (We've remedied that over the past 17 years.)

My wife's parents were partial owners of the house on the behalf of my wife's great grandmother and there is the distinct possibility they were also listed as the third party billing contact.

Well, I emailed the water authority to see if they could correct this. I've called them several times to see what is up, but they have always responded that everything looks right on their end. However, I have never had all the pieces in front of me.

We have similar situation for cell phones. My sister got my mother a cell phone years ago and put the bill in her name but my mother pays it. A couple years ago they upgraded they gave me my mothers phone old cell phone and put the bill in her name but I pay for the basic non-data phone plan.

Now at 12,000 posts, it's interesting that the ratio of this trivial unhappiness thread is running (post rate) about 2.2x that of the trivial happiness thread. I'm unhappy about this, but in a trivial way, I suppose. People around here like to fix stuff more than most, so it makes some sense since "why fix stuff that ain't broke?"

Things that make me happy tend to be of a personal nature that I won't share in a public forum; whereas things that bug me are often part of everyday experience that I'm happy to share. I imagine it's similar for at least some others.

Frankly, I find it more fun to complain! The happy stuff tends to be similar; "I spent time with my friends today," for example. Whereas it feels as though everything is annoying in different ways.

Like this morning, when I had to teach Simon that househunting means that sometimes, he will like a house but his dad and I will agree that it won't work for us. When his dad's head brushes the ceiling and the stairs are really narrow and steep and bad on my knees, we're not buying it.

_____________________________________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

Well the "bugs you thread" is 18 months older than the "makes you happy" thread. But, I think that Gillianren has hit the mark with her lighthearted comment - "Frankly, I find it more fun to complain!". Things that make you mildly happy don't really feel like something worth sharing but being mildly annoyed does seem to call out for sharing. It is like reviews of hotels or airlines - if everything goes well it is rarely reported but if some minor annoyance occurs then many people feel a need to vent.

Leaving voice mail messages, specially long distance ones, is it worth the cost. But the guy is a busy guy probably off doing a public outreach event or back in England. Well back to astronauts, clippers, dragonflies and ceasars.

I was just digging through the laptop bag to see if there were earphones in it. There weren't. I did find:
TWELVE USB memory sticks. I have no idea what's on any of them.
Just one SD card. Don't know what's on that either.
Four USB cables with "Mini" connectors. We need one for the external CD drive, but not four.
A couple of cables with micro-USB connectors for our old phones. The new ones are USB-C.
A box containing an uncharged "power bank" battery, with an assortment of cable connectors not including USB-C.
A charged power bank, which would have been handy in the USB-less hotel the other day, had I known it was there.
A laptop security cable which won't work with the travelling computer, which has a different connection.
I need to sort this out a bit better before our upcoming trip!

Backlight (or presumably, the power to it) for one of my monitors is dying. Sometimes the lower right of the screen is dark (but readable). Sometimes the whole screen is just black. Turn-off-on sorts it eventually.

Might try fixing it, but quite possible it's beyond me. There's a point where just the physical intricacy makes even the mechanical pulling apart and reassembly too much work.

Monitors are cheap enough, but I have two mounted on a custom hacked-up stand. And if I replace just one monitor (which won't match the other) it will bug the heck out of me.

I actually went through all the assorted wall-warts and other power supplies a couple of years ago, put numbered labels on them, and recorded their characteristics in spreadsheet. That's already come in handy at least once when the one for the computer speakers failed and I was able to identify another that worked.

I was just digging through the laptop bag to see if there were earphones in it. There weren't. I did find:
TWELVE USB memory sticks. I have no idea what's on any of them.
Just one SD card. Don't know what's on that either.
Four USB cables with "Mini" connectors. We need one for the external CD drive, but not four.
A couple of cables with micro-USB connectors for our old phones. The new ones are USB-C.
A box containing an uncharged "power bank" battery, with an assortment of cable connectors not including USB-C.
A charged power bank, which would have been handy in the USB-less hotel the other day, had I known it was there.
A laptop security cable which won't work with the travelling computer, which has a different connection.
I need to sort this out a bit better before our upcoming trip!

It turns out more of Simon's self-esteem than I'd realized comes from his really liking having people randomly tell him he's cute, and he's afraid that won't happen anymore because he no longer has those long, lovely ringlets. My Facebook friends all leapt to his rescue, telling him things like how striking his eyes are now.

_____________________________________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

Both kids had to get their heads essentially shaved due to treatment-resistant lice. The treatments that are effective are prescription only, not covered by insurance, and roughly $400.

When I were a lad, the treatment for scalp ringworm was to shave the child's head and then paint it with gentian violet. From personal experience, I can testify that that is a look it's very difficult to carry off with any dignity, let alone self-assurance. Particularly if you're also wearing bottle-bottom spectacles and sporting two broken front teeth.
Fortunately, it all happened at a time when no-one took photographs of that sort of hellish misadventure.

I remember begging my Mom to shave my head in elementary school when I had bad lice that required special shampoo, putting plastic bags over my head, and having my curly and thick hair combed hard with a very fine comb, just so I could be done with the lice. She did not oblige.

I remember begging my Mom to shave my head in elementary school when I had bad lice that required special shampoo, putting plastic bags over my head, and having my curly and thick hair combed hard with a very fine comb, just so I could be done with the lice. She did not oblige.

That was the approach to head lice when I was a kid, minus the shampoo and plastic bags - just the original "going through it with a fine-tooth comb" approach. With short hair, it lasted a week or so. Girls with long hair could be subjected to the process for a month or more before they were clear, IIRC.

In the all's well that ends well department, I woke up in the middle of the night realizing I had purchased the license tab for my truck several weeks ago, had not installed it, and did not know where it was. It'll be needed in a couple of days. I then lay awake about half the night fretting about it.
I found it about half way down the box of papers to be recycled, but it really bugs me that I do stuff like that.

I have to and get a new battery for the cell phone, probably a memory card because I didn't dump the old pictures and stuff off of the phone and a new power cord hopefully they have all here in town before we take off, oh to boot I might came back home in the back seat of my sisters car.